Free The Hidden Letters of Velta B. by Gina Ochsner Page A

left it so you would put it in my coffin. When we buried your namesake, she put a mirror in his right hand and a packet of cigarettes in his left one. A mirror is a window into the next world, and the dead hold it up like a compass to better steer by. The cigarettes? There’s nothing worse than the jitters, she said. Even the dead get them. And she told me about Gypsy heaven. The clouds are made of light bread and the houses are made of cheese. No one ever goes hungry, no one cries. The little orange foxes, the chanterelles that smell so much like apricots, fruit endlessly. No one wears white in heaven because white is the color of mourning. The songs are like wheels well soldered, well fit. They turn smoothly and without effort, and this is how it is that in Gypsy heaven the singing never ends.
    Â 
    Why am I telling you in such detail about what might seem like irrelevant conversations that happened before you were born? The short answer: it’s a way to keep our loved ones alive, if only in our embroidered fictions. And why am I narrating the stories of people you knew well and even about events you witnessed? A story is a garment made of many threads, sewn by many needles. Our story is a cloak thicker and more knotted than we suppose.
Like a tapestry,
I said the other day. You said,
No, it’s more like lace.
We hold lace up and marvel at the beauty of the light shining through it. But that beauty is only possible because of the knots anchoring the empty space.
Our story is like that,
you said, made as much of silence and emptiness as it is of the knots, those anchors of known fact, people. Who are the knots holding us in place? I could say that it was the Zetsches who ordered shape out of our emptiness. Or I could say it was Uncle.
    For three years after that fateful chess tournament, we didn’t hear much from him. A tattered and road-weary postcard from Tajikistan. (
The watermelons! Wow!
) A cable from Murmansk. (
Cold, cold.
) Once in a blue moon Uncle Maris called and the black phone swelled with his elaborate, overwrought, and altogether pitiful explanations for his behavior that we could only consider as obligatory fictions. For all his charm and brains, Mother explained to me once, our uncle Maris was the kind of man who could never perceive his own bodily stink, only the stink of others. And so she hung up on him whenever he called.
    During that time, both Rudy and I graduated from gymnasium by the skin of our teeth. Mother’s deepest fears were confirmed: she had not raised geniuses. That next autumn, several of my classmates, Jutta among them, rode the bus each morning to university. There she would pursue a brilliant life, I was sure, just as I was sure that my life was headed for all things dull and dreary. Had the Soviet Union not fallen, it is possible that Rudy and I would have gone to university. Higher education in those times was free, or nearly free. But after the fall, people like us who earned low marks did not go to university. People like us learned trades or worked in factories—if we were lucky. But as we were not lucky, we made ourselves as useful as possible in the cemetery. And then one evening the black phone on the wall bellowed:
eeeeeee-oooooooh!
    It was Uncle. On principle, Mother hung up on him. He promptly rang back and this time Father answered. He’d called to tell us that Rudy would go to university in Daugavpils. Maris had made all the arrangements. “It’s the least I can do.” His voice boomed through the black receiver. The next morning Rudy rode the bus to Daugavpils and that left me with Mother and Father. Mother applied herself to her newspaper. The frenzied activity in the real estate market she likened to piranhas let loose in a tank of meat. This newly liberated Latvia meant that Latvians, if they could produce the correct paperwork, could reclaim family properties that had been seized during the occupations. Curiously, a spate of fires